I can trip a referee..

David Lee Ready to Return

Whoever knew an infection can get so serious? Well, ask David Lee. He’s been battling the elbow injury for the past few weeks and its really put a hault on his career. Hopefully he can get past this and return to full strength. In his last game with the Warriors, he had 28 points and 10 rebounds against the Knicks on November 10th.

From Inside the Warriors:

Sorry I didn’t post this yestereday. It was good stuff, but it took forever to transcribe. I’m still not done. Will add rest later. I should just forward the file to TK so he could knock it out in like 15 minutes.

By way of intro, I can tell you his left elbow is heavily wrapped but the swelling is obviously way down. I saw it in Chicago and it was huge, and I heard it got bigger. The part I can see wasn’t discolored, though I didn’t see around the wound like last time. He still moves it very little and doesn’t straighten it at all. His right arm has the IV hook-up inside it. He took off his shirt and showed us. Normally, they would stick a needle in his arm then hook up the IV machine and give him antibiotics that way. But for convenience sake — not sure how convenient it feels — they just left some type of needle in his arm with the connections for the IV bag sticking out. His right arm basically looked like the back of a DVD.

Because of the IV thing and the infected right elbow, he can’t shower unless he wraps both arms tightly with Saran Wrap so no water can get in. Because Lee is a bachelor, he has to come to the Warriors’ facility to shower so the trainers can wrap his arms for him.

Without further ado, your starting power forward, David Lee … “I hope to be back here in the next week or so. I still have stitches to be taken out tomorrow and an IV line that has to get taken out on Wednesday. From there its just going to be a matter of – I’m staying back for the start of that road trip to start getting in the gym, working out and start getting back to it. I don’t know exactly how long its going to take because I don’t know how its going to respond once all that is out. But compared to where I was about four days ago, I’m really making progress. That one week that I went through seemed like a six-week process. If you think about it, if I’m able to get back next week, it will be like a two-week deal, two-and-a-half week deal. But it seems like months with all the stuff I’ve went through.”

“Really doing a lot better. It’s just going to be a matter now of having the wound heal from the two surgeries. What was very, very scary to me was seeing after the Bulls game, it felt like I was more or less out of the woods. And then, how infections works, until they found that right antibiotic, they were giving me strong stuff and nothing was helping. They were telling me ‘If we don’t get this thing better soon, we’re cutting your arm from here to here, filleting the whole thing open, and we’re talking about we may have to cut out your bicep muscle and forearm muscle and see what’s going on and how things are progressing. The fact that it could be limited to a two week situation, a two-and-a-half week deal, is a real blessing from a medical standpoint. I’m just happy we were able to figure it out.”

“I’ll tell you what worried me was the fact that usually an ankle sprain, or you hit knee-to-knee with somebody, things like that – those are things you’ve been through so you kind of know. If I sprain my ankle bad, it’s probably four to six weeks and I know what to do to get it better. It’s tough when because there are so many different kinds of bacteria in the human mouth, I learned you’re much better getting bit by a rabid dog than a human, which is crazy, because of the foods we eat, different bacteria. Once we found the right antibiotic, 80 percent of the swelling went away in a 12 to 18-hour period. But until we found that, it just continued to swell up my arm. I had a couple times where I woke up and I had no range of motion in my elbow or anything, so it was pretty scary.”

“I haven’t even been able to sweat. That’s why when I get these things out Tuesday and Wednesday, I’m going to go right back to working out to the limit of what they’ll let me do and I’m just going to hope that I haven’t lost too much. My concern isn’t so much that when am I going to get ready to get back on the court to play 40 minutes and get a double-double. My concern is I want to get back on the court and help the team. If that means the first two times out I’m playing 15 to 20 minutes, or 25 minutes, whatever it is, just able to do short stints, then that’s what’s important. Getting back to get victories. At the same time, a couple times I had to check my competitiveness and say, ‘OK, it’s more important to get this thing completely solved than to try and run back a day or two early. I’ma listen to the doctors, continue to do what they tell me to do and know that this is a pretty short process that I have left to go. So I should be back pretty soon.”